MARCH 2020 PCWorld 65HP Elite Dragonfly
PROS- Lightweight.
- Long battery life.
- Enhanced security features.
CONS - CPU performance lags behind others.
- Charging ports only on the right side of laptop,
which can hinder mouse use. - Some key functions force use of separate function
key.
BOTTOM LINE
The HP Elite Dragonfly is a corporate laptop offering
a solid configuration with some premium options;
good performance, amazing battery life; and a truly
classy design. It’s made for your boss, but whether
it’s deserved is another matter entirely.
$2,100
the bare minimum. If your boss’s idea of
“gaming” means solitaire or Flash-based
games, you’ll be OK.
BATTERY PERFORMANCE
Perhaps the most important test for a laptop
this portable is battery life. To test that, we
loop a 4K video using Microsoft’s Movies &
TV app. We set the display at a relatively
bright 250 to 260 nits, switch off Wi-Fi, and
connect a pair of earbuds for sound.
With its “1 watt panel” and large battery,
it’s no surprise the Elite Dragonfly knocks it
out of the park in battery life. And yes, that’s
about 18 hours of video playback.
Remember: Video playback is mostly on
cruise control today. Fire up Office and sit in a
spreadsheet all day scrolling around, and you’ll
likely whack off a third of the run time. Fire up
Chrome and fill it with 25 tabs, all looping and
downloading continual Flash-based ads, and
you can probably expect to cut the run time in
half, which is still about nine hours. Fire up any
application that grinds on the CPU or GPU for
the whole time, and you probably shouldn’t
expect more than two to three hours at best.
BOTTOM LINE
We’ll admit, we’re impressed by the HP Elite
Dragonfly. It transcends our expectations for
corporate laptops. Instead of boring, black,
and basic, the Elite Dragonfly is beautiful,
impressively light, and surprisingly
well-equipped.
For consumers looking for a little more rated
durability and versatility in a laptop, the Dragonfly
is worth a hard look—if you can stomach the
price. As a corporate laptop with manageability
features such as vPro and the “faster” Core
i7-8665U CPU, it’ll set you back $2,000 to
$2,200. And that’s without the optional $76 HP
Active Tilt Pen. You could skip the pricier
corporate features and still get a lot of laptop.